Interview with scott crow on Alpine Anarchist

For those not familiar with Common Ground Relief: can you tell us about the project in a few sentences?

Common Ground Relief was the largest anarchist-inspired organization in
modern U.S. history. We combined many anarchist/horizontal practices
and principles throughout the organization including direct action,
mutual aid, autonomy, and participatory democracy. Our motto was
“solidarity not charity,” which was the idea that we didn’t want to
just help people, but to actually support them in rebuilding their
communities and their own political power and self-determination from
below. We did this by providing aid and basic infrastructure to assist
people getting on their feet – as the Black Panther Party called it,
“survival programs pending revolution”.

In 2011, your book Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective was released. Can you tell us what the book is about and explain the title?

The book is a combination of several elements. It’s part personal
memoir of how an organizer from a working-class background from Texas
ended up in New Orleans, and part an organizing manual of how to look
at organizing with elements of “little-a anarchism” as a path for
transforming civil society.

The title is an allusion to two
things. The first is the black flags that anarchists have carried
throughout their long storied histories worldwide. The second is my
personal affinity to feeling like the Miguel de Cervantes character Don
Quixote. All my life I have been a dreamer and fighter against
injustice. Sometimes I have slain giants and other times just chased
windmills.

If we are talking about self-management, it
seems that you were facing extraordinary circumstances in New Orleans.
Most self-managed projects, whether it is workers’ co-ops or rural
communes, self-manage in a framework set by governmental institutions
and the capitalist market. It appears that when you set up Common
Ground Relief, the only framework you had were the people—the institutions and the market had disappeared almost entirely. Is this perception correct?

We were self-managed from the beginning. For us it was never a question
of whether we would be or not. The question for us was how would we
set it all up from the models available? I had a lot of experience
within horizontal/anarchist organizations over the years and had used
quite a few different models, but could not decide which would be the
most appropriate one for this context. My personal experience within
large and small groups—both open and closed—had led me to only
participate in small, closed collectives. I believe this is the only
way that we can really balance internal power dynamics, build true
trust amongst the participants, and develop strong political praxis
based on shared understood principles. But what we were embarking on
was a scale that was far beyond the largest open assemblies any of us
had ever participated in, with a wide spectrum of people. We actively
sought out more experienced anarchist organizers who began to come to
the area, which allowed us to draw on all of our collective historical
experiences. Over the first three years we experimented with many
different models with varying degrees of success, challenges, and some
failures. We were drawing on common threads from the traditions, ideas,
and histories of three somewhat disparate movements: the Black Panther
Party, the Zapatistas, and anarchism (specifically the Spanish
anarchists of the 1930s). We were drawing from their internal
organizing experiences as well as the connected programs and projects.

How was working with Common Ground Relief different from other self-management projects you have been involved with?

There are few “professional” horizontal worker cooperatives or
collectives within the United States. Additionally, there is not much
government “support” for these structures. In most cases the
hierarchical bureaucracies of the state find them to be confusing. In
the United States, most anarchist/horizontal collectives are
volunteer-based with a few worker cooperatives that are truly
democratic. The grassroots is where the culture of power-sharing goes
on. There has been very little support for horizontal cooperatives or
self-management on the government level. Most of it has only been in
certain cities or regions, with a few states that have laws that either
recognize it or support its growth. That is changing, but only slowly
and with much government confusion.

My own personal experiences
both in activism and in the work world have shown me that bottom-up
collective organizing with many perspectives, experiences, and thoughts
has been more effective than relying on one person or small group of
people to plan and direct something. Common Ground wasn’t always
completely horizontal, but that was the ideal we tried to attain. We
operated most of the projects like “affinity groups” under an umbrella
of the Common Ground Collective. Some of the others—like the health
clinics for example—operated mostly autonomously. We were a network
where we shared principles and resources. In all of these projects and
programs we shared information while consulting and operating in
coordinated efforts to support the residents of New Orleans and help
them build their power from below.

It is important to know that
these structures were fluid, morphing and changing over time. We
didn’t always have a clear blueprint of what the organizational
structures were while we were in them. They were very organic, every
time we formalized them, something would lead us to change or fine-tune
them. Then, there were the hierarchal tendencies within the
organization, which always caused tensions within the core coordinators
and how we operated. It was largely borne of four factors.

First, there were the people who didn’t have experience with anarchist
organizing or self-management. This was by far the largest grouping. In
the United States, there is not much experience in participatory
democracy or sharing our voices expect in small isolated spaces like
small collectives, in tree-sits, or mass summits for example. And once
out of those spaces, people have to return to their work with a boss or
landlord etc. There isn’t a continuum of exercising those voices.

Second, some people didn’t value it. They had bad experiences with bad
horizontal processes or just completely disagreed and wanted to be the
“the leader” of something. It’s hard to break those patterns which are
reinforced and rewarded in civil society.

Third, we often
executed really bad processes within many of the open meetings due to
lack of experience or group dynamics; blurring the lines between where
concrete decisions needed to be made and where spaces were opened for
peoples’ voices to be heard, while achieving neither.

Fourth,
some of our administration or projects were very centralized by
necessity. Some examples were the security teams, the finances of the
organization, and long-term visions or projects. These were things that
were held to a smaller group to keep relative control due to security,
health of the organization, or allocation of our scarce resources.

While some people say that disasters bring out the best in people, others like to cite Lord of the Flies, suggesting that you actually get to see the worst in people. What did you see in New Orleans?

I saw both extremes while there. I saw chaos on one hand where
situations were out of control and people were desperate enough to do
desperate things for their own survival—especially in the early days.
But I have to say that of the thousands of people I interacted with,
this was the minority. The white vigilantes and the police would be
extreme examples of the “Lord of the Flies” to me. But the majority of
what I did see—the part that gave me absolute love of humanity—were
those with absolutely nothing, who shared what little they had. People
realized quite quickly when they were left to die that they would have
to help each other and they did. If someone who had lost everything
had a bottle of water, they would give it to someone who needed it
more— just because they asked. It was mutual aid and cooperation for
survival that morphed into rebuilding their lives together.

I
also experienced people begin to self-organize without leaders or
governments. In political terms, it was direct action and mutual aid. In
these cases neighbours organized their own search and rescue missions
of people trapped, distributed supplies to those with the greatest
need, and later worked to decide what they wanted for the future.
People put aside their differences when it mattered for a common good.

That phenomenon is illustrated historically here in the United States by a wonderful book from my friend Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.
It gives numerous examples about disasters leading to growing social
movements. Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath was one of those examples, just
like the Mexico City earthquake in the 1980’s.

If it
is true that disasters, or severe crises, mainly strengthen principles
of solidarity and mutual aid, what are the political lessons we can
learn from this? After all, it would be cynical to hope for more
disasters and crises just to see more solidarity and mutual aid.

We, as movements, are excellent at reacting to socio-political
situations and mobilizing under crisis as I talked about earlier. The
biggest challenges I see, and what I want to us to do, are to create
these spaces, infrastructure, and movements without reacting, without
the crisis, without disaster. If we have these pieces in place—even on
small scales—and long-term goals or strategies, we can build grassroots
power and have more capacity to resist Power when the crisis
situations arise. We can build solidarity and mutual aid on small scales
in all of our communities. That isn’t always going to be exciting, but
it can provide communities with great power.

Given
the unique circumstances under which Common Ground Relief was founded:
what are the lessons to be learned for self-management in everyday
life?

Some things I think I have drawn from this are:

* We need to recognize that we have incredible decentralized networks
within horizontal/anarchist movements that can mobilize effectively and
well with great flexibility.

* We need more ongoing projects on
larger scales that are networked so that when crisis does occur we
don’t have to re-invent everything. Networked projects or groups could
plug in more easily to something on the ground.

* We need to create movements built on long-term strategies, not reactionary politics.

* We need, as movements, to connect the struggles on a daily basis not
just in solidarity, but in actual day-to-day organizing that resists
Power and builds counter-institutions simultaneously.

* We need
to recognize that people in the real world will never look like our
ideal politics and we need to meet people where they are. Otherwise we
are always going to be relegated to being a subculture or, worse, a
vanguard.

Perhaps most important is the belief that we can do
things for ourselves as individuals and communities. That we absolutely
do have the collective power to make sweeping changes across the world
and in our lives without appealing to Power. It’s like that old
cliché Think global but act local, where we need to connect and support
struggles elsewhere but recognize that the changes we are proposing
need to be done, and can be done, collectively in our own backyards.

Participatory democracy takes practice and commitment to unlearn the
past and to learn new things about ourselves. It takes time to unwind
all of our habits, prejudices, and biases, while learning to hear others
differently and learning to trust our own voices about decisions.

It is also important to recognize the Zapatista saying that “We are
building the road by walking”. The path is the journey to revolutionary
change. We will make mistakes along the way, but it’s okay, we will
continue walking.

We may not be able to stop global capital
from destroying the planet, but we can still create pre-figurative
communities and projects where we change our relationships with each
other and the environment, restructure our local food and water
security, rethink how we do or don’t use energy, how to defend our
communities, create alternative economies and counter-institutions,
reshape our work, culture, arts, and child care, etc.

You’ve been on book tours with Black Flags and Windmills, sharing your experiences with people across the U.S. What have the reactions been like?

Overwhelmingly positive. I hadn’t left Texas since 2006. I was working
on the book and recovering from the traumas of New Orleans and its
aftermath. I had no real gauge on how the ideas, the history, and the
book would be received. I am grateful for the engaging dialog that
ensues in every city, small or large, where I present the book. My
presentation is unusual in that it has roots in the book but goes far
beyond it. I ask a lot of questions about our current movements and
challenge us to begin to think differently about who we are and how we
engage in transformative politics for the future. Communities everywhere
are thinking about or acting on some of these ideas; I am just giving
them a language and narrative.

The other thing that I have
found is how fast we forget our radical histories. In such a short time
the history of New Orleans has been largely forgotten except
superficially – like the levees’ failure, the government’s failed
response and sheer brutality. But even in radical circles, the
bottom-up resistance to oblivion was not known that well, especially
not the grassroots organizing of Common Ground and all the other groups
who were doing work in the region. I think my book is creating an
opening to re-examine those experiences and histories, which I hope
will widen and continue. I believe there is a lot of practicality that
is relevant to the Occupy movements and other horizontal efforts today
and for the future.

How strong are notions of self-management in the U.S. today in general? What do you expect from the future?

It has been gaining ground for the last twenty-thirty years but has
been moving at hyperspeed for the last ten or so. It reaches from
volunteer collectives to professional non-profits to businesses that
are all examining, or re-examining, the way we make decisions and how
power sharing affects our work and lives.

Where is Common Ground Relief today? And where are you?

Common Ground Relief is still very much around, albeit in a smaller
capacity than it once was. The anarchist heyday is over, as it has
become a more traditional grassroots non-profit. We made a conscious
effort in 2008 to scale back. That combined with the forces of the large
NGO movement for funding sources led it to becoming much more
traditionally structured, but still with the “solidarity not charity”
analysis throughout its programs.

I still live in Austin,
Texas, where for the last five years I have stayed busy working a
“green collar” manual labour job at an anarchist recycling worker
cooperative, co-founded another worker coop thrift store called
Treasure City Thrift, and consult with others on building horizontal
worker coops as alternative economic engines to fund community-based
projects. I also contended with being labelled a “domestic terrorist’
by the U.S. government and political far right, outing a “friend” as an
undercover FBI agent, and dealing with all of the repercussions around
it. I have also continued to consult with various Occupy camps and
other groups on some of the best horizontal practices for power
sharing, decision-making processes, etc., as they continue to build
their grassroots political power.

Let’s say you had
three sentences to summarize the most valuable personal lessons from
Common Ground Relief: what would we get to hear?

That
ordinary people—you, me, and everyone else—compelled in extraordinary
situations can do amazing things beyond what we can imagine. That we
should continue to do so. And that our time to do something is now
because our collective futures are unwritten.